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	<h1>In ‘Book of Dahlia’ novelist Albert peers into abyss</h1>
	<h2>Speaking of brain tumors</h2>
      <p><strong>By Paul Haist </strong></p>
        <p>article created on: </p>
	<p class="content"><p>Elisa Albert&rsquo;s debut novel &ldquo;The Book of Dahlia&rdquo; could have been called &ldquo;The Short Unhappy Life of Dahlia Finger.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A clever student might argue persuasively for some parallels&mdash;real or imagined&mdash;between Albert&rsquo;s short novel about the early death of Dahlia Finger and Hemingway&rsquo;s short story about the unnatural death of Francis Macomber.</p>
<p>In the latter we are left to speculate about why Macomber died: Was it murder or was it an accident or some psychologically freighted combination of those options in the instant that his wife shot him on safari?</p>
<p>In the former, the question of why a dissolute, unambitious and expansively dysfunctional pot-smoking Jewish American princess maintained by her well-off father in a cozy cottage in Venice, Calif., should be struck down by brain cancer before her 30th birthday has no answer or optional answers and is not important.</p>
<p>What is important in Albert&rsquo;s book is how Dahlia died, that is, how she lived while she was dying, where the journey took her along the way and where it may have taken her at the moment of its end. We want to know if there is peace or only panic, even though we know we can&rsquo;t know.</p>
<p>What we see in the final and often tormented unfolding of Dahlia&rsquo;s apparently wasted life affords us the opportunity of redemption, if only for a split second, from the terror that haunts the shadows of our life, that final freefall into the unknown. For Dahlia it came in sinusoidal waves of panic and then the absence of panic and then panic again. In the absences, the spaces in between the panic, we might find hope.</p>
<p>In this grim and occasionally darkly comic story we live inside Dahlia from the moment she is diagnosed with an inoperable and malignant brain tumor until her end a few months later.</p>
<p>It is a journey in which, very near the end, the traveler and those of us who travel with her long for peace of mind or spirit.</p>
<p>No sooner do we think we might have taken hold of what we hope for than we lose our grip on it and are left with the vague recollection that something is or might be OK in the unknowable darkness.</p>
<p>The story is built on the successive chapters of a cancer victim self-help book that Dahlia buys on the day of her diagnosis.</p>
<p>The 18 chapters of the novel are named for the 18 often fatuous chapter titles of the self-help book, such as &ldquo;The Bright Side,&rdquo; &ldquo;You&rsquo;re the Boss&rdquo; and &ldquo;Be Grateful,&rdquo; most of which Dahlia routinely deconstructs and demolishes, as in the Jewishly titled Chapter 8 &ldquo;Choose Life,&rdquo; which Dahlia dismisses with a terse <br />
F-word curse, and then moves on instantly to Chapter 9. </p>
<p>Our understanding of Dahlia as a wounded soul is enlarged by frequent visits to her childhood and young adult life, and by articulations of her present resolute unwillingness to connect with her immediate family as she is dying.</p>
<p>That family comprises her pliant and loving father Bruce, her self-absorbed and vacuous Israeli mother Margalit who abandoned the family to return to Israel when Dahlia was a very young girl, and her older brother Dan, a hateful soul and a rabbi whose astonishing emotional cruelty toward his sister through much of her life failed for far too long to alienate her familial love and longing for him.</p>
<p>Just as some other writer might not have resisted the option of concluding the story with some soporific sentimentality, that other writer also might not have been able to keep Dahlia&rsquo;s family and Dahlia herself from becoming cardboard clich&eacute; characters, so sharply are they drawn.</p>
<p>Albert, however, avoids that pitfall with a focus, a voice, a tone, a timing and a depth that makes Dahlia and her small family as plausible and as credible as our own family members.</p>
<p>And, despite Dahlia&rsquo;s profligately aimless life, she becomes and then remains an engaging and sympathetic character because of her profound self-awareness&mdash;her gift, from the day of diagnosis, for transcending or slicing through denial, which very much distinguishes her.</p>
<p>Although we lose Dahlia, her remarkable self-awareness will lead readers of this story to remember her for a long time&mdash;and as a standard against which they might measure themselves.</p>
<p>The &ldquo;quiet desperation&rdquo; in which most people live arises at least in part from the routinely unspoken awareness of how ordinary and unremarkable their life and each of our lives are.</p>
<p>Dahlia does not give new meaning to unremarkable; she merely is quintessentially so. But in the end she is vividly memorable&mdash;and uncommonly remarkable&mdash;for the penetrating honesty of her soul opposite the impending final reality and the panic it engenders.</p>
<p>Near the end of Dahlia&rsquo;s bumpy journey from diagnosis to hospice we are told: &ldquo;She needed something good, something pure and whole to go out on, to hold on to, to take with her.&rdquo; Albert suggests that this is &ldquo;the benefit of dying unsurprised.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In that stated need there is an implicit question: Did Dahlia have what she needed? Was Dahlia ready, and, by implication, can we be ready?</p>
<p>Where the question evokes pathos, the answer evokes bathos&mdash;in the non-pejorative sense of recognizing something common or universal in what previously was exalted by its mystery.</p>
<p>That epiphany or the suggestion of its presence makes &ldquo;The Book of Dahlia&rdquo; a tiny pinpoint of white radiance in the vast, dark, still place deep inside each of us.</p>
<p>We cannot say what it is. Any understanding of it we thought we had dissipates altogether in a small fraction of the time needed to articulate it, like trying to remember a dream we know was poignant but all the details of which have evaporated.</p>
<p>But that we can glimpse that tiny point in the infinite blackness, however momentarily, on the last page of Albert&rsquo;s novel gives us hope for something, even though we can&rsquo;t remember what it is we thought we might have seen. Or did we only hope for it? Dahlia can&rsquo;t tell us anymore, for&mdash;all her final waves of panic notwithstanding, ready or not, there she went.</p>
<p>In Dahlia&rsquo;s death it seems as though she really had lived. Now, in the way that literature allows, she really does live, and her life enriches ours, even if we can&rsquo;t remember exactly why or tell anyone exactly how.</p>
<p>You had to be there.</p>
<p>Albert teaches creative writing at Columbia University. She previously published a collection of short stories entitled &ldquo;How This Night Is Different,&rdquo; and one of those short stories, &ldquo;Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose,&rdquo; is reproduced at the end of her novel.</p>
<p>Albert&rsquo;s older brother David died of a brain tumor 10 years ago when he was 29. His age and his illness are the only significant similarities he has either to Dahlia or Dahlia&rsquo;s older brother, according to statements by the author in an interview with Scott Simon on NPR&rsquo;s May 3 Weekend Edition.</p>
<p><em>&ldquo;The Book of Dahlia&rdquo; by Elisa Albert, &copy; 2009, Free Press, New York, hardcover, $23</em></p>
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